Barack Obama’s campaign has posted a blog post announcing the launch of its official account on Scribd, the online document repository. The page, which can be accessed at http://scribd.com/barackobama, will serve as a resource for documents related to Obama’s policy, along with official statements.

Y Combinator-funded Scribd is a “YouTube for documents” that allows users to upload an array of filetypes that are converted to a Flash format viewable on most computers. The document viewer, called iPaper, can also be embedded in web pages. Since its launch in 2007, Scribd has seen explosive growth, and now claims to see nearly 20 million monthly unique visitors.

Scribd’s inclusion in the Obama campaign isn’t surprising given the candidate’s adoption of web-centric services like Twitter (his official account has over 52,000 followers). In contrast, opposing candidate John McCain has admitted to not being particularity tech savvy, though as we noted in our endorsements for the candidates, his policies will matter far more than what web 2.0 services he’s fond of.

Scientists are not the most social people on the planet. Many of them would rather be holed up in their labs trying to make the next big discovery than hanging out on Facebook throwing virtual pies at each other (although there are exceptions). But what if they could organize their all their scientific papers online and share them easily with other members of their lab?

Mark Kaganovich figures that will get them online. After graduating from Harvard with undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and computer science two years ago, he set out to create Labmeeting. In May, 2008 he closed a $500,000 seed round from Peter Thiel, Kinsey Hills, and other angel investors. And since last week, Labmeeting has been open to anyone with a college e-mail account.

Typically, scientists have stacks of papers, protocols, and notes in their offices that they pass around as PDFs. Labmeeting is designed first and foremost as a document management site that allows scientists and students to easily upload all of those PDFs, organize them, search them, and share them. Scientsist can create groups, and invite other members of their labs to create a common repository of papers that can be accessed from anywhere. The PDFs appear inside an embedded Scribd window (Kinsey Hills is also an investor in Scribd).

Says Kaganovich:

What we are trying to do is change the way information in biomedical research and the medical community is distributed and retrieved.

Scientists can recommend papers to colleagues, mark them up, create collections, and follow what other scientists are collecting. Each scientist gets a profile page. By interacting through their research, they are more likely to interact with each other. Labmeeting could also form of basis a community ranking system for scientific papers, based on who is reading, writing, and sharing them.

Labmeeting is free for individual scientists and students. Eventually, Kaganovich plans to charge subscription fees to corporate users such as drug and biotech companies.

Docstoc has taken a page out of YouSendIt’s book by releasing a desktop applet for sending documents to others via email without having to worry about size restrictions.

The Windows-only OneClick app enables users to right click on certain file types (Word, PDF, Excel, etc.) and choose to email them via Docstoc. The files will begin uploading to the startup’s servers in the background while an email composition window opens with pre-generated links to them. Recipients simply need to click these links to begin viewing or downloading the files, which can be up to 50mb in size and set as either public or private on Docstoc.

OneClick’s restrictions on file types and sizes mean that it will compete only minimally with more focused online file transfer services. But it does have the advantage of unlimited and indefinite storage, as well as background uploading (there’s no need to wait for uploads to finish before sending your email). At the very least, it’s a clever move to encourage more content contribution to Docstoc. As with Scribd and other UGC destinations, content is king – what else is Google going to index?

See a related announcement by Scribd from just last week that enables onsite previewing of email attachments.

Drop.io, a file storage and sharing service, has partnered with Scribd to bring streamlined document viewing to the site. From now on all supported documents that have been uploaded to Drop.io will be viewable in Scribd’s Flash-based iPaper viewer.

Drop.io’s “drop box” storage isn’t exactly unique, but it has a nice interface and a few key features that help differentiate it from the pack. Earlier this year the site rolled out “Voice”, which allows users to call a number and record voice messages of any length, which can be used as personal notes or for podcasting. iPaper will allow users to view documents in a wide variety of formats (including most major office files) in any browser that supports Flash.

Adding Scribd’s iPaper will remove the hassle of opening attachments, but it seems like Drop.io is playing catchup – Box.net, a similar service, offers iPaper integration and lets users edit their files using Zoho. It’s possible that Drop.io is aiming for simplicity over a more complete feature set, but allowing for platform-agnostic file editing probably wouldn’t hurt. Other players in this space include Box.net and Dropbox.

Scribd is launching iPaper@Scribd today, a new feature that lets users convert outgoing email attachments to the company’s iPaper format. Documents in iPaper can be viewed in any browser that supports Flash, which should mitigate the inevitable headaches associated with getting email attachments to work properly.

The system is remarkably simple: CC ipaper@scribd.com on your outgoing email message, and everyone else on the recipient list will receive links to Scribd-ified versions of the attachments. Scribd currently supports a wide range of document formats, including the dreaded Office 2007 format. Alternatively you can send the attachment to Scribd without CC’ing others – Scribd will send just you the link back and you can then forward it on.

In an exchange for convenience, users will have to deal with a few quirks. Every time you send an attachment using the service, your recipients will receive two messages: the original message with the attachment, and the one that Scribd sends containing a link to the iPaper version. Some people might like having an original copy of the document, but the prospect of getting even more email is a bit of a turn-off. Users can also simply choose to download the original document from Scribd as well.

The document is set to private at Scribd, which means it isn’t included in their directory or indexed by search engines. That still means this is a poor choice for sensitive documents since you are posting them on the Internet. But for less sensitive materials, this sure beats sending around huge attachments by email.

Continuing its push to become a major provider of Webtop software, Adobe is releasing two new products on Monday: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9. Adobe’s Webtop arsenal already includes the recently launched online version of PhotoShop and its online media player, Adobe TV. Acrobat.com is another big step towards bringing more desktop-like experiences to the Web. “It is our intent to blur a lot of the lines of the past,” says product manager Erik Larson.

Acrobat.com—Online Word Processing, Meetings, and File Sharing

Acrobat.com is a combination of three recently launched online services: Adobe Brio (online meetings), Adobe Buzzword (online word processor), and Adobe Share (online file sharing). Thus with the public beta launch of Acrobat.com, Adobe is taking on Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting—all at the same time.

Buzzword is now integrated into Acrobat.com as the default word processor. (I reviewed Buzzword and Share when they first launched last March). Multiple people can edit a document and leave comments. Tabs along the bottom representing different people show you who has accessed the document most recently and their status (author, reviewer, etc.). It paginates documents, supports all kinds of fonts, and lets you create the closest equivalent to a PDF that is possible online.

All the documents on Acrobat.com are organized in what up until now has been Adobe Share. The document and file-sharing service now offers five gigabytes of free storage, and lets you embed documents in a widget on other sites across the Web. (I’ve put an Adobe PDF widget at the bottom of this post). This last feature should worry startups like Scribd and DocStoc, which are based entirely on the ability to upload and share documents in a similar fashion.

Finally, my favorite part, Acrobat.com includes Brio, which is a light version of Adobe Acrobat Connect. It lets up to three people have online meetings for free, with screen sharing, desktop video, voice conferencing, chat, white-boarding. You can add in a regular toll line for a fee. Anyone with a Mac is going to love this. Whenever I get a virtual demo, I prefer to do it through Adobe Connect because WebEx and GoTo Meeting sometimes don’t work with my Mac. And Adobe’s Flash viewer simply looks better.

Acrobat 9—Now With Flash

At the same time Adobe is launching Acrobat.com, it is releasing Acrobat 9—a major upgrade to one of its anchor desktop apps. The big news here is that for the first time, Adobe’s PDF-creating desktop software will support Flash. So people can now create documents with embedded Flash movies from YouTube, or developers can design entire new skins for electronic documents using Adobe’s Flex framework—the same programming tool they use to create Web applications.

PDF documents made with Acrobat 9 also support collaboration among multiple authors and reviewers over the Internet, making them connected documents. Best of all, they no longer take forever to load. The next step is for Adobe to make it easy to turn any PDF into a Web page, and vice versa.

Scribd, the “YouTube for documents”, has announced that it will be removing all pornographic material from the site beginning May 21.

Here’s the announcement from the site’s blog:

Over the next month, we will be updating Scribd’s Terms of Service to prohibit pornographic documents and images. It’s become clear that adult content is limiting Scribd’s usefulness to educators, parents, students, and publishers – exactly the types of users that benefit the most from our site and services.

Starting today, there will be a one week grace period to allow users with adult content on Scribd to download it to their local computer before it is removed from the website.

So how will this affect the YCombinator startup? The site has seen impressive growth since its launch in March 2007, and now says that it has 17 million monthly visitors. It’s also recently been adding new features including an API and iPaper, a replacement for FlashPaper that allows authors to monetize their documents. But there have been claims (NSFW) that much of Scribd’s traffic is generated by pornographic and pirated material (the “Adult” group is one of the largest and most active on the site).

Should we expect Scribd’s traffic to take a nosedive? Unlikely. Porn may have helped Scribd gain momentum in its infancy, but the site has long since proven its use as a blogging tool and a document repository. If anything, it’s surprising that it took Scribd this long to make the switch.

Other players in this space include edocr and Docstoc (both of which are porn-free).